


A Pirate's Life For Me

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Age Difference, Domestic, F/M, Momento Mori, PWP, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-17
Updated: 2011-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:21:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When you were younger you’d fancied you could mould him; when you were a little less young you’d thought perhaps at least you could break him to rein. </i></p><p>Or: Terezi takes Karkat over a table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Pirate's Life For Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [urbanAnchorite (t_ZM)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_ZM/gifts).



> Thanks to Meowgon for the prompt beta job!

He’s up late again. Too many days a week-- or what passes for days, in your little dustpocket of a hideout-- is he up late, worrying. Fussing. He check and doublechecks, retraces steps, pours over lost battles like headcases peel their own scabs, searching out his own weaknesses and eating his own fears.

You pull yourself out of the cold, empty recuperacoon, and wipe slime from your face, your nose, your mouth. From the taste of it, he hasn’t been by at all in the past day. Unacceptable! You pull down one of his spare cloaks from the storagehook and make yourself a loose shift. No one’s around at this bitter hour to see your fashion disaster, or care.

The corridors are smaller every sweep, and stink of poor ventilators, too-often repaired. You whistle as you pace them down: _Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me._ The sound bounces off the peeling paint, the old dusty murals you’d painted in your younger, brighter nights, when he’d smiled more. You win more battles than you lose, you know this, but somewhere along the way big chunks of your matesprit’s soul got traded over as collateral. And it’s fair, isn’t it, it balances-- and what does that make you, that you’d sell all those pieces over again if you had to?

Maybe it just means the both of you are growing up. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

When you poke your head into the conference room he’s there, reeking of bitter exhaustion and computer-static. He’s muttering to himself, circling endlessly around the holotable as his hands move smooth and ceaseless through the displays, fingers slicing like fighting fish through the rainbow blur of holography. His voice is a shredded rasp: _Take three parsecs at half a click and you’ve got half a shot to an ambush-- no, no, stupid, used that move just last week, be expecting that, luck doesn’t last. No! Yes! Oh, fuck me yes. Fifth squadron, seven parsecs rimwards._

 _Computer, run simulation!_

He gestures you over without a break in his dance: _Terezi, look at this._ One wrist turns, and the other fingers grasp. The room pulses dizzily with stars and he steps aside for you to place yourself square at the helm of the display.

 _A pincer movement,_ he says with hoarse satisfaction. _You take half our crew like this and I take the rest around in the runabouts like that-- see, like what we did last month they’ll be expecting something like an ambush and I’ll give them a fucking ambush, light, fast, wham, and when they counter attack like ha ha, stupid rebels, then you go and screw their shit seven ways from a holed bucket. In and out, fast, carve the fleet apart and then get out while they’re still rattled. See?_

You give him a pointed elbow.

He amends: _Smell._

 _It could work,_ you concede. You take one of his hands: _Come to bed._

 _No time. We have to get this out--_

You cut in: _In three nights. The fleet won’t be close enough to be worth the fuel to get to them, and you know it._

 _Oh, speaking of fuel..._ and he’s off again, plans and deals and dreams tumbling out of him. The thought, the word, the deed, Karkat’s never bothered to separate any of it out and hence no matter how hard the both of you play at grownup he still exists as an unrefined confluence of yearning and drive. When you were younger you’d fancied you could mould him; when you were a little less young you’d thought perhaps at least you could break him to rein.

Now you are well into your teens and you know that he is a perpetual explosion, and all anyone can do is wrap themselves around all his fire and fury and attempt to focus the blast.

When he leans over the table to gesture at the middle of some supernova or other that he thinks might be usable as an inertial sling, you apply both hands firmly to his ass.

 _Terezi!_ he yelps, and you squeeze a little.

 _If you won’t come to bed,_ you threaten, and he groans and leans hard on his arms. The arch of his spine carries the ghosts of galaxies, and static-stars cluster thickly around his hair. When you put your teeth to the high bony nape of his neck he sighs.

 _There’s so much to do,_ he says, and for a moment he is so heartbreakingly himself that it hurts to even touch him. But his ass is nonetheless very warm, and he feels as delicious as always when you press yourself up against him. You slide a hand between his legs and rub, gentle enough to invite, firm enough to insist. You’re hungry: for his flesh, for a bit of his time, for him to just fucking _stop,_ for once.

He moans, more than a little reluctantly, but doesn’t twist away. You moan back, high and long and showy, hump him a few times for good measure, and he laughs and throws an arm-hinge back at your chest. You catch it, step back and spin him around and down. His shoulders hit the tabletop with a dull smack and blaze of computational errors, lighting up all the turning stars and ships with blue and purple warnings. You ignore each and every one of them to enjoy the way his ship-pale skin is starting to flush for you, candy red rising up like ink across his face.

 _Terezi,_ he says again, but soft. You smile, knowing he’ll read the returned sentiment from between your fangs, and you flick open the catch of his jumpsuit. He huffs and kicks at you, but not hard enough to kick you away.

He says: _buy me dinner,_ an old, old joke.

 _You wouldn’t eat it,_ you say, which isn’t a joke at all. You get so terribly tired of running through the same paces over and over again. He looks terribly grave for a moment, nearly repentant, and you tweak open another catch. Then he does that thing where he raises an eyebrow and looks adorably wry. Fond exasperation rises off him in hot sheets. He is thin, under the stiff formal lines of his suit: no one will let him go into battle anymore, he’s your game-ending king, beautifully fragile. Infinitely precious. You feel the aggression of his ribs as they press up under your palms, and when you drag greedy fingers down the tender weals of his grub scars he squirms, lets you shuck him right out of his slate-gray wrapping. It only tastes of tiredness, and you discard it with impunity.

 _Maybe I’ll have dinner,_ you muse, and give him a long slow lick, lingering across the warm salt plane of his stomach. Don’t go, don’t go, the wiggler’s rhyme chimes in the dusty corners of your mind, and you mouth it against the blade of his hip: _I’ll eat you up, I love you so._

Everything is songs and portents, tonight. But he only arches up like he’s still six sweeps underneath you, and you can smell his slow sad smile.

 _I’m too bitter,_ he says. _You’ll only get indigestion._ His fingers card so gently through your hair, like you’re the fragile one.

 _Too stupid,_ you correct. _Still confusing salt and sweet after all this time, Karkat, now really._

He says: _So school me._

You lick him, at the juncture between his legs. He makes a beautiful little whimper and throws his head back, and you settle in, enjoying yourself and this exquisitely simple pleasure. He tastes of life, red-hot and willing, and you could saturate yourself with it and never quite be full enough, never manage to acclimate. For a while there is only the soft hum of static and the rattle of his breath as he twitches beneath you, the delectable wet sounds of your tongue against his flushed and straining bulge. For all that he holds himself stiff underneath you, reluctant to damage the delicate membrane of the table’s display, his bulge betrays the efficacy of your ministrations. It is wet from far more than just your mouth, slicking his thighs and your lazy-wandering fingers a glistening pink with his desire.

You pull back to admire the effect, and lick a little fluid off one of your hands. Karkat makes a frustrated, gasping sort of indrawn breath--

 _So,_ you say, feeling wicked. _A pincer movement, Karkat, really?_

 _I-- what?_ He gapes at you, then: _Yes, fuck you, why not a pincer movement--_

 _We don’t have enough..._ you roll your tongue slow up and down his length, and he shudders helplessly. _Firepower,_ you say, and he even laughs a little at that.

 _Not for a rout,_ he says breathlessly, tugging on your hair as you keep licking at him, _give me a little, ah, fucking credit. A raid. We slice in like knives, take out as many engines as we can, nasty damage, not lethal, we’re looking to make a big, nn, big-- fucking mess, Terezi, oh, not rack up a body count. Our real battlefield is in every one’s hearts and minds, you said so yourself, and if we show up from a lot of different angles-- ah, fuck, fuck, Terezi, no, don’t, I’m gonna--_

You pull off him, breathing almost as hard as he is. It’s smart. Not just smart, it’s perfect, your own unforgiving brutal psychological assessments looking back at you out of all this passion and it means _more,_ now, when he says it because he believes it. He goes to the heart of everything, this man. He goes to the heart of you.

 _Let me fuck you,_ you demand. Your voice is a hungry croak. Your bulge has slicked your own legs a ravenous blue.

 _Since you ask so nice,_ he mocks, that same hunger curling off him in damp waves.

 _Do we have room for deserters,_ you ask. You run tortuously slow fingers down along the wet slit of his nook. You’re shivering, shuddering, barely sane. _For prisoners. Are we going to take them._

 _As many as will come, we take,_ he says firmly, and his legs are quivering for want of you. Then: _God, Terezi, don’t make me beg--_

 _Traitors,_ you muse. _Spies. Mutineers and insurrectionists. Cowards._

 _Refugees,_ he says, and his voice is vibrant with pity. _Looking for a place to breathe free. Like us._

You can’t stand not being inside him for another moment. You heave off your knees and sheath your own aching bulge inside of him, pin his hands down with your own. The wet slapping noise of your joining bodies is nothing to the overwhelming flood of sensation, the sheer red-hot startlement of being part of something bigger than the both of you.

He curls his fingers through yours. _Ah, Terezi,_ he gasps, as if you are everything he could ever want, and his legs come up around your hips. You rock into him, insistent, ferocious, and when you take his throat in your teeth he only cries brokenly with pleasure, perfectly pliant, perfectly trusting, perfect, perfect, perfect.

He’s so _good._

You are Terezi Pryope, legislacerator, oathbreaker, kingmaker, pirate queen of the high starry seas of space and you are never more yourself than when you are with this man, curling yourself all through him in the terrible warm alchemy of mating fondness, of _love_ , that makes the two of you something bigger and stranger together than you’d ever be in your separate pieces.

You have never known anyone who could love like Karkat: entirely, sincerely, with every last part of himself. To pity him is, by extension, to be matesprits with the entire universe for he has poured himself methodically into the very stars, night after night, fight after fight, till there’s nothing left to him but his soft loose skin, his beautiful worn-through voice. He curses and frets and he meddles and fusses and he _loves_ , and when you bury yourself in him you can smell the vast spiral arms of the galaxy turning in his chest. He has never aimed any lower than as high as he can possibly get, and you would never be anywhere but a half-step behind him, _reaching._

 _Terezi,_ he cries, over and over, your name spilling out like supplication, like blood-sacrifice from between his gritted teeth, _more, please, Terezi, yes,_ and you: you don’t say anything at all. You are beyond the need for words, for anything but fucking him hard and fast and with everything you’ve got, everything you could never say.

He finally screams his last, and convulses beneath you. Red spills thick and heady across his stomach, sheeting across the table and tinting every whirling star a gorgeous crimson and it’s too much, too right. Your own climax sleets through you, shorts you out, and you pour yourself between his legs with something like triumph, only better.

Your pleasure is a shallow, selfish thing, bottled up tight just between you two. You and he will never share a pail, will never bear your race children. You’re no links in that grand chain. You contribute only the gifts of the mind towards the future: fire blazing unexpected from the darkness, and the rough-struck glint of freedom.

It is sufficient. It is more than enough.

He catches you, before you can crumple, and pulls you to lie with him in the wet and tattered muck the table’s membrane has become. You nip and giggle at each other like wigglers through the aftershocks. His arms have worn reed-thin and hollow with the sweeps but they hold you with just the same tender ferocity as when you were lesser people.

There is no sound save heavy breathing as the two of you wind down, and the glutinous hiccupy sparking of one thoroughly ruined computational display. The stars that revolve above the two of you now form entirely inaccurate constellations, and you can’t bring yourself to care the slightest bit.

He says: _you are a horror,_ and he kisses you right between the horns. A beautiful lie, if not his finest.

You hum a little, just to tease: _Yo, ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me,_ and he rolls his face against yours, lips close enough that the two of you can enjoy the companionable warmth of not quite kissing.

His voice is the throaty purr of a dying engine as he sings, softly, badly, fondly: _Though many a sweep has be given to me, I’ve poured all my nights out upon the wide sea: drink up, my hearty, yo ho._

The sweeps have twined silver all through his hair, and against your cheek is a map of heavy lines and creases. He’s thirteen, and old from it in a way you can barely fathom. You close your eyes, though it doesn’t change a thing, and you sing the last into the darkness: _A life’s long in living if the living be free, yo, ho, yo, ho, a pirate’s life for me._

 _I love you,_ he says, under your kiss.

You know.


End file.
